Simple and Sustainable Preparation of Nonactivated Porous Carbon from Brewing Waste for High-Performance Lithium–Sulfur Batteries

Abstract

The development of renewable energy sources requires the parallel development of sustainable energy storage systems because of its noncontinuous production. Even the most-used battery on the planet, the lithium-ion battery, is reaching its technological limit. In light of this, lithium–sulfur batteries have emerged as one of the most promising technologies to address this problem. The use of biomass to produce cathodes for these batteries addresses not only the aforementioned problem, but it also reduces the carbon footprint and gives added value to something normally considered waste. Here, the production, by simple and nonactivating pyrolysis, of a carbon material using the abundant “after-boiling waste” derived from beer brewing is reported. After adding a high sulfur loading (70 %) to this biowaste-derived carbon by the “melt diffusion” method, the sulfur–carbon composite is used as an effective cathode in Li–S batteries. The cathode shows excellent performance, reaching high capacity values with long-term cyclability at high current—847 mAh g−1 at 1 C, 586 mAh g−1 at 2 C, and even 498 mAh g−1 at 5 C after 400 cycles—drastically reducing capacity loss to values approaching 0.01 % per cycle. This work demonstrates the possibility of obtaining low-cost, highly sustainable cathodic materials for the design of advanced energy storage systems.